One of the longtime problems that Walmart has had with its many e-commerce efforts is that the retailer has a very healthy heritage of being physical-store-centric, and that perspective colors the thinking of many Walmart executives.

True merged-channel thinking is entirely channel-agnostic. Put simply, the store has no preference whether a shopper buys from a traditional website, a mobile device, a physical store or a call center. In the same way that a store manager doesn’t care whether a shopper enters the store from the north entrance or the west entrance — as long as they enter and buy stuff — retailers shouldn’t care how a customer comes to them. But decades of seeing themselves as a physical store isn’t deleted overnight.

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